A single call center can accept and/or make hundreds, if not thousands, of calls each day. Each accepted call results in at least one conversation between the customer and one or more call center agents. Information about these conversations may be desirable to an operator of the call center so that the operator can improve the services provided by the call center. Such information may be easily obtainable for a conversation by a human listening to the conversation. However, the number of conversations handled by the call center makes human analysis of every conversation unachievable.
While a speech recognition system may be able to recognize words spoken by the participants in a conversation, the words spoken are not necessarily indicative of the quality of the conversation as a social interaction. Moreover unconstrained speech recognition requires significant computational resource and, particularly if one participant speaks with an accent or the acoustic conditions are poor, the reliability of words generated from the speech recognition may be less than desirable. Accordingly, analysis of a conversation's quality may be better determined using means other than speech recognition.